Site grades pundits on their predictions

To the talking heads of the world, consider this a fair warning: PunditTracker.com has its eyes on you.

The site — which as the name suggests, monitors and rates the predictions of pundits — had a soft launch in 2012 and is ramping up its political pundit tracking for President Barack Obama’s second term. While it started with your household-name pundits — your Karl Roves and Jim Cramers of the world — it’s expanding its political roster to include just about anybody, including users.

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“If we find a pundit and they’re making predictions, we’ll put them on the site,” said Sanjay Ayer, founder and CEO of PunditTracker.

Ayer’s motivation is to fix what he sees is a terribly broken system of punditry.

“You get so-called experts coming on television, making a very bold prediction, and two months later, it’s dead wrong. But they come back on the show, and they’re still referred to as an expert with no reference to that past call.”

As a result, says Ayer, pundits know that big, bold — even bad — predictions can be good business.

“If you put yourself in the shoes of a pundit, it’s an easy playbook. You make a ton of predictions and, if you’re right, you’ll get fame and lots of money. And, if you’re wrong, no one will call you out on it.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the pundits who have at least 25 predictions and are being tracked by PunditTracker aren’t doing well. In fact, they all have “F” grades — those pundits include Pat Buchanan, Eleanor Clift, John McLaughlin and Dick Morris.

“To be on TV a lot, you have to be bold and over the top, so it doesn’t shock me to see those pundits have poor predictions,” Ayer said.

Although Ayer, 31, says the site has eight people working on it in various capacities, it’s a side project for him (his day job is as a stock market research analyst in Orange County, Calif.), which, of course, hints at one of the site’s biggest challenges: How are you going to track — and grade — the increasingly swollen world of political punditry?

“Frankly, we can’t do it unless we get the users engaged,” Ayer admits, noting that the site allows users to submit predictions to be graded. But, from Ayer’s perspective, that’s not even the biggest challenge; the biggest challenge is the pundits themselves.

“Pundits are very good at crafting their calls to avoid accountability,” said Ayer, who says a lot of the feedback he gets regarding the site’s prediction grades concerns “whether the pundit hedged it, whether they gave a different timeline, whether it was a bit more subjective.”

Believe it or not, Ayer doesn’t see his site as being anti-pundit but rather a booster for good pundits.

“If you are a so-called expert, you would, I think, want to be able to show that you are good at making predictions.”